QLogic FastLinQ 45000 Series of Ethernet Controllers Enabling 10, 25, 40, 50 and 100GbE

At Mobile World Congress, QLogic Corp. introduced the FastLinQ 45000 Series of Ethernet controllers, enabling 10, 25, 40, 50 and 100GbE-based network connectivity on a single high-performance ASIC.

The latest QLogic FastLinQ Ethernet-based technology is extensible and flexible, delivering a set of capabilities customized to address the needs of the telco, enterprise, MSP, cloud and storage markets.

“The QLogic FastLinQ 45000 Series offers support for more protocols and features than any other technology available in the market today,” said Jesse Lyles, VP and GM, Ethernet products, QLogic. “We designed our latest Ethernet-based products to address the rapidly changing needs of the data center and the specific needs of mega data centers run by telecommunications providers, MSPs and enterprise private clouds.“

These solutions provide IT administrators with support for an extremely expansive set of features and protocols, delivering the following key benefits:

Improved Server Utilization:
QLogic FastLinQ 45000 Series solutions provide hardware offloaded protocol processing, which results in a significant reduction of the CPU burden and improves overall server efficiency. Hardware-offloaded protocol support includes:

Broad multi-protocol RDMA interoperability, with CPU offload for RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), RoCEv2 and Internet wide area RDMA protocol (iWARP), delivering the first truly universal RDMA Network Interface Card (RNIC).
Hardened storage protocol interoperability, with CPU offload for iSCSI, FCoE, iSCSI Extensions for RDMA (iSER) and NVMe over Fabrics, provides a Converged Network Adapter (CNA) solution that supports not only traditional SAN connectivity, but also newer scale-out storage solutions that are based on object and file.

Increased Scalability for Virtual Servers and Networks:

Advanced NIC virtualization capabilities with support for Multi-queue, NIC partitioning (NPAR) and Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV), enables faster performance in virtualized environments and tenant consolidation, which requires the use of fewer physical ports while maintaining QoS and SLAs.
Support for Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) supports network function virtualization (NFV), which enables and accelerates virtual network function (VNF) applications and provides flexible deployment of server nodes in data center carrier networks.
Extensive overlay networking (tunneling) capabilities with stateless offload support for network virtualization using Virtual Extensible Local Area Network (VXLAN), Network Virtualization using Generic Routing Encapsulation (NVGRE), Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) and Generic Network Virtualization Encapsulation (GENEVE). These capabilities optimize performance while reducing the cost of network encapsulation for virtualized workloads and hybrid cloud deployments.

Efficient Administration:

Optimized for software-defined networking (SDN) and OpenStack deployments, leveraging NPAR, SR-IOV, tunneling offloads, DPDK support and broad storage protocol integration.
The FastLinQ 45000 Series’ expansive set of features and protocols are integrated into the QLogic QConvergeConsole (QCC), which simplifies deployment, diagnostics and management from a single-pane-of-glass, streamlining storage and networking I/O connectivity orchestration.

Lyles continued: “Combining hardware offloads, which reduce demand on the server CPU, with the highest bandwidth available today, the QLogic FastLinQ 45000 Series maximizes server utilization and eliminates network congestion. These benefits are key requirements for the upcoming server refresh cycle and the exponential growth in storage.”

“With 2.5 times the bandwidth compared to current generation 10GbE adapters, and fewer lanes enabling lower overall costs than 40GbE, 25GbE provides a more cost effective path to 100GbE,” said Seamus Crehan, president, Crehan Research. “I predict the uptick in 25GbE adoption will be faster than it was for either 10GbE or 40GbE technologies. Furthermore, I expect that the demand for products, such as the QLogic FastLinQ 45000 Series will be strong in both telco and cloud-based data center environments.”

“The data center is on the verge of experiencing a major speed upgrade cycle, driven by server migration to 25GbE. This migration will be first driven by large mega scale data centers, with the rest of the market following suit quite rapidly, as the price premium of 25GbE over 10GbE collapses on the switch side,” said Sameh Boujelbene, director, Dell’Oro Group. “We predict that 25/50/100GbE will comprise over a third of server access ports, within just three years of shipments.”

“Large service providers are using NFV to fundamentally change the architecture of networks,” said Lee Doyle, principal analyst, Doyle Research. “Enabling virtualized network functions, the QLogic 45000 Series helps administrators improve programmability and lower overall costs.“

“The data center market is just beginning the deployment of 25/50GbE, and initial deployments are expected with large cloud service providers (CSPs) looking to migrate from 10GbE server connectivity to 25GbE server connectivity with 100GbE switching. Mainstream enterprises are expected to follow later in 2016,” said Cliff Grossner, Ph.D., research director, Data Center, cloud and SDN, IHS. “QLogic with the 45000 Series is now well positioned to benefit from this opportunity.”

QLogic’s new Ethernet technology will be showcased at Mobile World Congress in the Hewlett Packard Enterprise booth. This demonstration will highlight the QLogic 45000 Series performance advantages in telco environments leveraging NFV.

The FastLinQ 45000 Series of controllers and adapters will begin shipping this quarter and will be available in multiple form factors and media formats.

Initial QLogic-branded offerings will include single-port and dual-port 25GbE adapters and a single-port 100GbE adapter.

“Dell is committed to providing customers with future-ready data center solutions, including integration of technologies like the QLogic 25GbE network adapter card into Dell PowerEdge servers,” said Brian Payne, executive director, PowerEdge servers, Dell Inc. “Future 25GbE solutions will enable network bandwidth to be cost effectively scaled in next generation cloud and Web-scale data center environments, providing more than double the bandwidth available in standard configurations today.”

“Cloud and big data are driving large-scale data centers and enterprise IT networks to provide customers with solutions that enable higher throughput and data processing efficiency,” said Qiu Long, GM, server domain,Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.. “The QLogic 25GbE connectivity solution can improve connection bandwidth and provide customers with a seamless upgrade path to 100GbE for higher performance and scalability, improving user experience of multimedia applications, cloud computing and big data.”

“Mirantis and QLogic are partnering on solutions that bring advanced storage and networking features and functionality to the growing OpenStack community, including a Fuel plug-in for QLogic FastLinQ Ethernet Adapters which installs and configures SR-IOV and VXLAN features seamlessly with OpenStack environments,” said Kamesh Pemmaraju, VP of product marketing, Mirantis, Inc. “As telecommunications companies have embraced network virtualization as a way to increase performance and agility, this plug-in automation will improve network provisioning, saving administrators time and operational expenditures.“

“Fueled by open source innovation, today’s modernized and virtualized infrastructures provide new answers to both existing and emerging IT challenges; these same infrastructures, however, require a new level of connectivity, such as that delivered by the QLogic 45000 Series,” said Radhesh Balakrishnan, GM, OpenStack, Red Hat, Inc. “Red Hat has long provided the foundation for this open source innovation, and we are pleased to work with QLogic to help power the open, connected infrastructure of the future enterprise.”

“As virtualized infrastructures evolve, requirements for more bandwidth, lower costs and simplified management are increasing,” said Howard Hall, senior director, global technology partner organization, VMware, Inc. “Sharing the vision of simplified infrastructure operations and increased application SLA visibility, VMware is pleased to collaborate with QLogic to bring technology advancements to market.”